Wishnok/Tannenbaum Mass Spectrometry Lab

The lab was started in the late 1960s with help from the Campbell Soup Company to the MIT Department of Nutrition and Food Science for the purchase of an Hitachi RMU-6E double-focusing mass spectrometer. It was supervised at that time by the late Phil Issenberg, and the research involved food-related areas such as odors, flavors and oxidation products. In the early 1970's the emphasis shifted toward food-related genotoxic substances such as aflatoxins and nitrosamines, and GC-MS was used extensively both to identify potentially toxic food components, and their precursors and metabolites, and to quantitate them.

By 1974, Phil Issenberg had moved to the Eppley Institute in Omaha, and Pete Wishnok joined the Department, working first with Mike Archer (now at the Ontario Cancer Institute) and then with Steve Tannenbaum. Support shifted to NIH (e.g., NIEHS and NCI) and the laboratory became the basis of the Analytical Cores for Program Project Grants under Steve Tannenbaum (Endogenous Nitrite Carcinogenesis in Man) and Jerry Wogan (Molecular Biomarkers of Exposure and Effects of Environmental Carcinogens). Sara Stillwell - who joined the group in 1985 after having worked at the Institute for Lipid Research at Baylor University College of Medicine with the Horning group - has recently retired. Paul Skipper has had an especially significant role in the development of the accelerator mass spectrometer.

A series of Hewlett Packard instruments, including 5992, 5995, and 5972 benchtops, a 5987 GC-MS, and a 5989B LC-MS, along with a Finnigan TSQ 7000, were well-used over the intervening years. The current equipment includes an Agilent 1100 capillary XCT ion trap, a PerSeptive Biosystems Voyager DE STR MALDI-TOF, an Applied Biosystems/Sciex API 3000 triple-quad, an Applied Biosystems/Sciex QStar quadrupole time-of-flight and - our newest instrument - an Agilent 1100 LC-MSD TOF. In collaboration with Newton Scientific Instruments, Inc., we developed GC and LC interfaces for a small accelerator mass spectrometer, and are currently evaluating applications for this instrument.

The laboratory is supported primarily by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Cancer Institute, and DARPA. The AMS project is supported by Small Business Grants from NIH and NSF.